Cloud Atlas

by David Mitchell

Old, blind, and sick as Ayrs is, he could hold his own in a college debating society, though I notice he rarely proposes alternatives for the systems he ridicules. “Liberality? Timidity in the rich!” “Socialism? The younger brother of a decrepit despotism, which it wants to succeed” “Conservatives? Adventitious liars, whose doctrine of free will is their greatest deception.” What sort of state does he want? “None! The better organized the state, the duller its humanity.”

How vulgar, this hankering after immortality, how vain, how false. Composers are merely scribblers of cave paintings. One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn’t, the wolves and blizzards would be at one’s throat all the sooner.

She was widely read enough to appreciate my literary wit but not so widely read that she knew my sources. I like that in a woman.

Are molecules of Zedelghem Château, of Robert Frobisher’s hand, dormant in this paper for forty-four years, now swirling in my lungs, in my blood?

People are obscenities. Would rather be music than be a mass of tubes squeezing semisolids around itself for a few decades before becoming so dribblesome it’ll no longer function.